


me and my husband

by rillrill



Series: bad ones [3]
Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Accidental Marriage, Internalized Homophobia, Las Vegas Wedding, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-02-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:27:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22782490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillrill/pseuds/rillrill
Summary: Except, well. There’s some part of him that keeps thinking those two words over and over, what if? What if? What if? That’s all he’s thought since he met the fucking kid. What if I told you to kiss me? What if I liked it? What if we did something horrible to each other, something we couldn’t take back?
Relationships: Greg Hirsch/Tom Wambsgans
Series: bad ones [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1582297
Comments: 19
Kudos: 154





	me and my husband

Tom wakes up close to eleven with a thudding red headache. This is the kind of hangover they write country songs about, and he really wishes he hadn’t opted for a hotel suite with floor-to-ceiling windows, because it is much too fucking bright in here. Then a wave of nausea hits him, and he stumbles to the bathroom. He’s thrown up two, no — three times, efficiently, standing up but bent over with his hands on his knees, when he realizes he’s wearing his wedding ring. Huh. Habit’s a hell of a drug. He doesn’t remember putting it on last night, but he doesn’t remember _most_ things he’s done since they got to Vegas. Whatever. He lurches closer to the toilet, spits out another mouthful of bile, and stays there like that, his whole body heaving with exertion, until the feeling passes. 

He rinses his hands and his mouth, holding onto the sink for dear life, and gives himself a hard look in the mirror: he’s pale and clammy and bloated, puffy bags under his eyes. He looks like shit. He _feels_ like shit.

From the suite, there’s a creaky-sounding groan, and then Greg’s voice very audibly says, “Jesus Christ.”

Not again. Tom blanches, because, of course. _Of-goddamn-course_ , fucking Greg would be the punctuation mark at the end of his newly-divorced boys’ trip to Vegas. This was supposed to be a cliche, but not a _cliche_. 

“Jeez _-fucking-_ Louise,” Tom whispers at his own reflection, examining his body for hickeys or possibly visible bruises, and flushes the toilet several times to over the sound of his voice. When he emerges from the dim bathroom, wincing as the ultra-bright morning sunshine hits his bloodshot eyes, Greg is seated upright against the headboard of the California king bed, looking sobered and grave.  
  
“How are you holding up?” Greg asks.  
  
Tom glares at him and jerks his head toward the bathroom. “Think I just threw up my one good kidney. The chamber’s all yours if you’d like to follow my lead.”  
  
“I’m fine,” Greg says, his voice short. His eyes flick down to Tom’s left hand, and a look of dark, nauseated horror descends on his face like a veil, and he mutters, “Oh, shit.”  
  
Tom glances down at the ring on his left hand. “I don’t even remember putting it on, okay? Look. I’m taking it off.” He waves it in the air theatrically, pinched between his thumb and forefinger, and sets it on the nightstand. “You wear one of these things for a year and it’s like second goddamn nature.”  
  
Greg closes his eyes and his head lands on the headboard with a _thunk_. “Tom, would you want me to tell you if you did something really, really stupid last night?”  
  
“Of course not, Greg. That’s not what friends do.”  
  
“Then whatever you do, _don’t_ look at that picture on the desk.”  
  
Tom blinks blearily. His headache is beating like a snare drum all the way down his spine as he stumbles to the desk. The photograph is tucked inside a cheap cardboard sleeve that reads _The Little Neon Chapel_ in faux-retro script. And the ring on the desk, which has left a greenish cast on his finger overnight, is not his own.  
  
This time, he doesn’t bother trying to make it to the bathroom. He throws up into the wastebasket under the desk.  
  
  
*  
  
  
It’s just. On the sliding scale of stupid shit he could’ve potentially gotten himself into in Vegas, a drunken quickie marriage to his ex-wife’s cousin didn’t even feel like an externality worth planning for. Killing a stripper, maybe; _marrying Greg_ , no.  
  
The ink wasn’t even dry on the divorce papers, for God’s sake. This was supposed to be a celebratory bacchanal to herald the return of Tom Wambsgans to the realm of the unmarried; a “bachelor again” party, as he conceived it. A new beginning. Except, as it turned out, five days in Vegas was just too long to stay in Vegas. There were six of them at the start of it. They started dropping like flies after day two; Miles had to get home to his kids, Rob had a meeting he couldn’t miss, William’s wife went into labor (it was his _fourth_ kid, nothing he hadn’t seen before). Ben, his old work buddy from Cruises, was the only one who was straight with him: “This is wearing me out, man,” he said as he rolled his suitcase through the lobby of the Bellagio. “You can’t stay in Vegas for more than three days. It turns you into a fucking mud turtle. Just grimy and slow and gross.”  
  
Mud turtle, Tom thinks, rubbing his temples in small, circular motions. And Greg was the only one left by night four. Which would explain — all of this.  
  
Their flight’s at four. Greg leaves the suite wordlessly to pack in his own room as Tom paces the floor, alternating between tentative bites of a room service omelette and steadying sips of lukewarm ginger tea. He tries not to look at the picture on the desk, but every time he does, another little bit of the night before reattaches itself to the totality of his memory.  
  
It was just him and Greg by the time night fell, and Tom remembers feeling — antsy. Eager, like he always felt on vacation, like he had to get out and drink in every minute of his time off from real life or else he’d risk missing something amazing. It was Greg who balked at the line for 1OAK, rolling his eyes and shaking his head. “Absolutely not."  
  
“We’ll cut the line, Greg.” Tom rolled his eyes right back. And Greg looked at him with an inscrutably confused face, like, _there’s no way you’re cutting that line_. Tom grabbed him by his (surprisingly sinewy) upper arm and hauled him up to the front, eager to show him exactly what money still got a man like him in this country — except, Greg was right. Because outside of the major media markets like New York and D.C. and occasionally L.A., nobody had any fucking idea who he was out here. Who either of them were. And it was that kind of anonymity that had him getting into an Uber with Greg, whose legs were just a little too long for the backseat, on the way to what Greg promised was “An actually decent club, with like, normal fucking people.”  
  
The address Greg had punched into the app was well off the Strip, in downtown Vegas, which looked to Tom’s eyes like any other mid-sized American city: strip malls and storefronts and coffee shops past closing time. There was no line outside the bar where the driver dropped them off, only a neon sign that read _Oddfellows_ and advertised Coors Light. Pretty much exactly the type of depressing gin joint Greg _would_ try to convince him was really cool — it probably offered two-for-one Irish car bombs and nickel shots on weeknights. This would be predictably dire, and he’d spend an hour here getting Greg drunk enough to agree to move on to a real club, where they could resume behaving deplorably once more.  
  
He bit back a snide remark as they walked in, only to find himself pleasantly surprised. The drinks were served in glasses, not styrofoam cups — a step up from the last bar Greg had invited him to in New York, some fratty place in South Street Seaport covered in bras hanging from the ceiling — and beyond the bar, there’s a dance floor, crowded but not packed with mostly men.  
  
_Overwhelmingly_ men, actually.  
  
“Greg,” he shouted over the music, “is this a gay club?”  
  
Greg bobbed his head. “Is that, like, a problem for you? Because…” He furrowed his brow. “I just figured, right?”  
  
Tom frowned. “That’s awfully presumptuous of you.”  
  
“Whatever,” Greg said, and grabbed Tom’s bicep, pulling him into the crowd, away from the door, away from safety. Tom set his jaw and let it happen. He didn’t know what the hell to make of that. When they reached the bar, he turned back to Tom with an expectant, hazy look on his face and asked, “So, you want a drink?”  
  
Tom rolled his eyes. A bar was a bar, he reasoned, and besides, nobody knew him here. The humiliating incident at the previous club had proven that quite handily. There was no reason to abide by the rules he kept in New York and in D.C., nothing to fear from being noticed in a gay club while still, technically, an executive at a conservative cable news network in a high-profile heterosexual marriage.  
  
“Sure,” he said. “Dealer’s choice.”  
  
Greg waved to the bartender, whose name tag read Raquelle, and ordered six shots of tequila, throwing down his own credit card despite Tom’s halfhearted protest. When she’d poured out all six, Tom took the lime in one hand and downed three shots in a row, licking the salt from the back of his hand. It was barely a step up from well liquor, not gold-flecked vodka, but it would get the job done.  
  
“Nice,” Greg said. He sounded nearly impressed, Tom thought, watching him lick his lips, glance darting from the empty shot glasses to Tom’s mouth and back again like a pinball, two, three times.  
  
Tom jerked his head toward the remaining shots. “Do you want to drink those, or will I be having an early night?”  
  
Greg raised his eyebrows and wrapped his long, elegant fingers around a shot. It shouldn’t have surprised Tom how easily Greg downed all three shots. What did surprise him was how methodically Greg went about it: the lime, the shot, the salt, his tongue darting over the back of his hand, dark blue eyes flickering up to meet Tom’s. When he finished the third, Greg turned the glass over and wiped the back of his mouth with his hand, his eyes landing back on Tom in a way that Tom knew could be a prelude to another bad idea.  
  
And then they were moving again, Greg pulling him by the hand into the throng on the dance floor before Tom could tell him no. The song playing was unrecognizable, but it didn’t seem to matter. It all happened too fast to keep track. The shots hit him, and then he was dancing, halfheartedly at first and then loosening up with the liquor. He lost Greg as they both moved with the motion of the crowd, and Tom sucked in a deep breath of sweaty bar air and made the executive decision to enjoy this; to actually let loose in the way he ostensibly came to Vegas to do. And then he felt another set of hips behind him, grinding up on him hard and nasty, another set of hands — big hands, daring hands, nothing tentative about them — and he let it all fade away, enjoying the practiced roll of hips against his ass, the casual arrogance of the grip this stranger had on his hips. He didn’t dare turn around. He let go.  
  
He lost track of time, of things in general. He let the current of the room take him wherever it wanted him to go as one trashy Rihanna remix bled into another. He surrendered until a few bodies shifted, the crowd parting like the Red Sea, and what he saw made him bite down on his tongue so hard that he started right out of the trance. It wasn’t the tequila; it was unmistakably Greg, wrapped around another man, a man who was tan and muscled and wearing a tight black t-shirt.  
  
Tom felt something jerk inside him, something dark and ugly and nearly feral that sent up a war chant of _mine mine mine mine_ as Greg clapped a hand around the nape of the other man’s neck, nosing along his jawline. Their lips had barely met before Tom felt himself shouldering through the crowd, feeling possessed, like some demon he barely knew and didn’t like had taken control of all his remaining faculties. He shoved his way between them, feeling reckless and angry and scared, and he grabbed Greg by the wrist and snarled, “The hell do you think you’re doing?”  
  
Greg looked dazed, not startled; he didn’t flinch. Tom _wanted_ him to flinch, but he just kept dancing, and all Tom could focus on were Greg’s shoulders, broad in his chambray-colored button-down, and his neck, and the sweat on his forehead. Tom was met with the urge to lick it off, run his tongue from behind Greg’s earlobes all the way up to his widow’s peak, and the overwhelmingness of the _wanting_ throttled his bloodstream.  
  
“I want another drink,” Tom said, bullish. “This is _my_ vacation, Greg. Your treat.”  
  
They found their way back to the bar and Greg ordered again; two each of something called a “Cock Shot,” which turned out to be mostly sugar, and one more of tequila, for luck. There was nothing lucky about this ritual, Tom thought, they’d be lucky if they could move tomorrow at this rate, but he could practically feel the heat coming off Greg’s gangly frame in waves, and what remained of the boundaries he’d so painstakingly constructed between them crumbled. He stepped closer, swallowed the last Cock Shot and his pride, and slid one hand over Greg’s sweat-soaked lower back before he lunged into a brazen, very stupid kiss.  
  
  
*  
  
  
He doesn’t see Greg until it’s time to leave for the airport, but clocks him instantly in the hotel lobby, loitering nervously by the revolving doors and looking at his phone. Reflexively, Tom checks his watch. Theoretically, they _could_ go back to the chapel and have this whole thing undone and still make their flight, but with traffic and paperwork — he doesn’t know how long it takes to annul a wedding but it sure fucking takes a while to get divorced — it isn’t worth the risk. After all, they’re the only ones who know. Thus far.  
  
In the car to the airport, there’s a noticeable chill between them. Greg’s not looking him in the face, just staring out the window as the buildings get shorter and squatter and the crowds get leaner and the views get scrubbier.  
  
The thing is, he’d already thought about — maybe — coming out. Maybe not with _Greg_ , of course, but with someone else, in a few months’ time, testing the waters — maybe going beyond fumbling encounters and plausible deniability could be good for him. Maybe that would make a difference, maybe he’d stop feeling so goddamn low, maybe he’d actually become one of those people who practiced meditation and saw a therapist and didn’t lie, compulsively, about everything he could get away with. He’d thought in circles around it for weeks, tossing and turning in his new bachelor pad; one of those nights, in a fit of brazenness, he downloaded Grindr, cropped his face carefully out of his fully-clothed profile photo, but deleted it in horror the minute he received a message requesting what the sender (rather artlessly) called “hole pics.” And the next morning he found himself deep in Google searches for “delete iphone app history,” consumed with the same familiar, ominous fear he always felt the moment he found himself getting a little too comfortable with his supposed inner nature.  
  
Anyway, the point was moot. Because in return for a relatively speedy divorce in the wake of their marital death cruise aboard the U.S.S. Roy, Shiv’s attorneys hit him with an unusual clause in the contract: an NDA, with a clause which specifically precluded any public display of behavior which might be deemed “embarrassing, defamatory, or malicious toward Ms. Roy or the Waystar-Royco brand.” He’d pressed her on that, because what the fuck, and she’d responded in her typically flippant way: “I’m covering my ass here. Don’t leak any classified info, don’t write a fucking Roy family tell-all, don’t embarrass me in the press.”  
  
“Or what?”  
  
Shiv studied him, her gaze as cool and implacable as her father’s. “I’ll drop an anvil of a lawsuit on your head. Forget about going back to Parks and Cruises, Tom. The only job you’d be able get when I was done is operating the kiddie-coaster at Six fucking Flags.”  
  
In the wake of Kendall’s coup, the whole goddamn company felt as hot and volatile as Gorbachev’s Kremlin; he was lucky as it was that she saw him clinging to the rubble and didn’t simply shoot him in the back right then and there. He left Shiv's lawyer’s office, bought a soft pretzel from a street vendor and walked down Park Avenue to his empty apartment, eating it without tasting. He resigned himself to the facts: he’d have to lie low for at least a year if he even wanted to think about — _that_. The clause was drawn in purposely vague terms, but he was still pretty sure that the press would have a field day if Shiv Roy’s ex-husband got caught with some twink’s hands down his pants in Central Park.  
  
So he dropped the idea then and there and beat a hasty retreat, and booked six first-class tickets to Vegas a couple nights later. It would still be a new beginning, just not the kind he’d wondered whether he was brave enough to have.  
  
But, well, no. He’s good and fucked now. Sunglasses on, he studies Greg in the backseat as their car nears McCarran International. Married in Vegas by a bad Elvis impersonator. He’s such a colossal fucking idiot.  
  
In the airport lounge, Greg makes a beeline for the bar. Tom doesn’t have the stomach to start drinking again, but when Greg presses a glass into his hand, he takes it, just to have something to hold. Outside, planes are taxiing around idly. “Our flight’s gonna be a little delayed,” Greg mumbles. “Something about thunderstorms over the Rockies.”  
  
“Fantastic. Triple-fucking-A for effort, Delta.” He takes a sip reflexively: it’s just Diet Coke.  
  
Greg downs his drink and jingles the ice cubes in the glass. “I feel like we need to talk.”  
  
“I’d rather not,” says Tom.  
  
Pained, Greg pinches the bridge of his nose, screwing up his face in a parody of deep, obvious thought. Tom wants to punch him, or maybe kiss him; the fact that he doesn’t know which strengthens his resolve to keep ignoring it until he does. “Yeah, only, like. We got _married_.”  
  
“Keep your voice _down_ ,” Tom hisses, incensed. “Jesus Christ, Greg. You have no idea who could be eavesdropping on us right now.”  
  
Greg looks cagily around the lounge before he says, “Nobody here gives a shit about us.”  
  
“That may be so,” Tom says, “but this isn’t the time.”  
  
“So when is the time?”  
  
“Later,” Tom snaps.  
  
“Okay,” Greg says. A second later, though, he adds, “But like, this would just be really bad for me if it gets out.”  
  
“Of course it would be bad,” says Tom. Then he parses Greg’s full statement and makes a face, disgusted. “Wait. Bad _for you_?”  
  
Shrugging, Greg rattles the ice in his glass. “Yeah, like, just that it’s _you_.”  
  
“What the _fuck_ is that supposed to mean, Greg?”  
  
“I mean, no offense or anything?” Greg shrugs again, at a loss for words. “But the optics are like, not great? You were my boss, and you _just_ got divorced. From my _cousin_. And you're, you know…” His eyes drop to the floor and he picks at the skin on his left thumb.  
  
Tom feels something sour and mean swelling in his chest like a balloon, pushing out any other kind of emotion he might have had room for before now. “I’m what, exactly?”  
  
“Just.” Greg makes a queasy face with one side of his wide mouth. “Not the most popular guy at the moment.”  
  
“Fuck you, Greg. Fuck you very much.” Tom gives him the finger before burying his head in his own hands. “You’re such a goddamn prick.”  
  
Greg doesn’t say anything to that, and Tom stays like that, clutching his temples and feeling his pulse pound. Fucking _Greg_ doesn’t get to be more ashamed than him. There’s no planet on which that makes a pound of sense. He is _Tom Wambsgans_ , freshly named one of the most eligible bachelors in media by Connecticut Magazine. Greg is, what? Some liberal arts haircut with two pairs of good shoes and a scattershot resumé? Tom _made_ him, like Michelangelo, took a hunk of clay or marble or whatever the fuck it is sculptors use and banged at it with a hammer and chisel until this gangling contrapposto fuck emerged. And now he wants to be ashamed? He ought to be grateful that Tom even _deigned_ to marry him, even by mistake.  
  
Fucking Greg.  
  
He stares balefully at the ugly airport carpet, his face growing hot. He wants to ask, _So, all the other times we fucked were what, some kind of humiliation kink I didn't know you had? Some game of Greg Chicken I didn't know I was playing?_ But he doesn’t want to hear the answer, now knowing what it might be.  
  
When their gate agent finally boards all first-class passengers en route to JFK, Tom elbows his way ahead of Greg and plunks himself down in the window seat, still seething. He wrenches the cap off his trusty pre-flight Xanax and doesn’t offer one to Greg, who sits silently, stretching his legs out all the way to the bulkhead. He specifically booked their seats in Row A for this ingrate.  
  
He pointedly ignores Greg until sleep takes him somewhere over Colorado.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Tom spends the next three days pointedly not calling, texting, emailing, video chatting, or otherwise bothering Greg. Which, come to think of it, might actually be the longest lapse in communication between them since they met.  
  
He’s got other things on his mind, anyway. A reporter tweets something offensive about the coronavirus and Tom gives him the obligatory tongue-lashing, his heart not even half in it. There are meetings with the head of morning programming, the head of newsgathering, rumblings of a potential mass exodus at the D.C. bureau over a seething all-employees email from their charmingly coked-out new CEO. It’s not until he runs — literally, nearly spilling a full cup of coffee — into Greg in the hallway outside the 16th floor elevator bank, en route to an all-hands executive meeting that this feels real and bad again.  
  
“Fucking hell, Greg, we should put a dog collar with some jingle bells on you to warn when you’re coming,” he snaps without thinking. Greg steps back like he’s been hit, and Tom falters. “Sorry. Just startled.”  
  
“I get it,” says Greg. “I’ll see you upstairs.”  
  
“Upstairs, as in the meeting?”  
  
“Ken wanted me in the room.” Greg gestures with his armful of folders. “Don’t, uh, worry. Nothing you need to be concerned about.”  
  
“Well, that just makes me feel as though I should be concerned,” Tom says, dabbing at the spreading coffee stain on his shirt. The elevator dings open, and Greg steps inside.  
  
Tom waits for the next car.  
  
  
*  
  
  
The meeting, predictably, is a shitshow: Kendall on the warpath, Roman undercutting him at every turn, Greg sitting conspicuously in the far corner of the room, right in Tom's eyeline like some awful human Chrysler building. When they adjourn, Tom rushes out of the conference room, dabbing his forehead with his Brooks Brothers tie. Back in the safety of his office, he removes the emergency scotch from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and sloshes it into a branded ATN mug.  
  
What a mess. He doesn't even know where to start. He thought, with time and space, there might be a way out — that a strategy would simply reveal itself in time. But it looks like he’s irrevocably fucking married.Which is to say, they need to have this mistake annulled and scrubbed from the public record like a blood stain on a cruise ship pillowcase, a-fucking-s-a-p.  
  
_Think_. He rips the top sheet off a legal pad and begins free-associating — no wrong answers in a brainstorm, just like they teach you in school. He jots down _cleaner, lawyers_ , and _even legal???_ before losing momentum.  
  
The thing is, if Greg doesn't want this getting out either, then why hasn’t he said anything? And for that matter, why isn’t he the one banging down Tom’s door begging for an annulment, if he’s so embarrassed? Closing his eyes, trying to breathe, Tom resists the urge to send everything on his desk flying and white-knuckles the pen in his hand.  
  
_Think, you stupid motherfucker_ , he commands himself again. But he’s tapped out on ways out, and when he leans back in his ergonomic chair and stares up at the popcorn ceiling and fluorescent lighting of his drab corner office, all that comes to mind is: _what if._  
  
What if. They sat on this for a while.  
  
What if. They didn’t do anything too quickly.  
  
What if. They let things shake out upstairs, let the pieces fall where they may, before making any rash decisions? Slow and steady, like everything else in business — when you try to rush a deal through and hold it too tightly, it falls apart in your hands, just like the Pierce acquisition showed them all. Nobody needs to know right now. This could be their little secret. Friendly, but binding.  
  
Every time they’d slept together before, it was with the mutual assurance that this would never amount to anything. Tom made sure they both knew that. Part of it, he supposes, was a measure of control — open marriage or not, his wife’s cousin was off-limits, that much was just common sense — but another part of it was a threat to himself. The illusion of danger was only thrilling when it came with the understanding that at the end of the day, he was never really threatened. It was catharsis; it was mutual deniability; it was an overwhelming sense that every time was definitely the last time, at least until they decided to do it again.  
  
So there was never going to be a future. There was no point in even imagining one. Shiv mostly made him feel like garbage all the time, and Greg was an outlet for that, a steam valve. It’s a unique function of Tom’s libido that he has, for much of his life, conflated being horny with feeling like garbage, to the point to the latter can produce a Pavlovian reaction of the former — the Wambsgans Paradox, all part of the grand unified sexual theory of Roy, he supposes — but there was only so much he could take. It used to be that being made to feel like garbage was exciting in its own way. And then it wasn’t anymore; it just made him feel like the duplicitous middle-aged homo he now suspects he actually is.  
  
That’s the only reason he can think of that he’s actually giving this proper consideration.  
  
Except, well. There’s some part of him that keeps thinking those two words over and over, what if? What if? What if? That’s all he’s thought since he met the fucking kid. What if I told you to kiss me? What if I liked it? What if we did something horrible to each other, something we couldn’t take back? Everything he’s done, his whole life, has always been careful. Until he met Greg. Greg makes him reckless. Greg makes him want something so bad it hurts, and the minute he figures out what that something is, he's going to take it and destroy it so nobody else can ever have it, that’s how bad Greg makes him _want_.  
  
When he looks back down at the notepad, he sees that he’s written out _Tom Hirsch_. Like he’s some fucking middle school girl doodling names on her binder. Which, well, it sounds good, but he is _not_ doing that. “Jesus Christ,” he mutters. _Get a fucking grip_.  
  
  
*  
  
  
There’s no guarantee Greg will even be home, but, well. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Tom showers at the gym, puts on a fresh undershirt, breezes past Greg's doorman with a cheery, familiar hello. He realizes he’s seething when the elevator opens on the top floor. There's no plan. No strategy in hand. He’s improvising here, and he’s really fucking bad at improvising.  
  
He knocks hard on Greg's door, and keeps knocking until he hears someone padding across the hardwood foyer floor, until there's a rustle at the keyhole and Greg opens the door, warily, like he's afraid he might get shot.  
  
“Hey,” Greg says. Tom thinks he’s losing his mind. He does lose his mind, all the time, and this time he rides the rush, he pushes past Greg into his loft, then spins his ungainly frame around, pushes him flush to the front door, and yanks him by his striped green tie into a hot, sloppy kiss.  
  
Greg responds with a ready hunger that belies his three days of radio silence, opening his mouth and deepening the kiss, and Tom lets out a sound like he’s been punched in the gut. Greg rears back, looking bewildered and heady, and Tom feels almost savage. He drops to his knees, mouthing along the outline of Greg’s cock in his gabardine trousers, and shoots an expectant look upward. “Take your fucking pants off, Greg.”  
  
Looking like he’s been clubbed with a two-by-four, Greg fumbles with his belt, shoving his pants and his boxer briefs down his thighs in one go. Tom doesn’t think, just lurches forward, licking along the bony knob of his hipbone as Greg rucks up his shirt with one hand. He pauses for only a second before he sinks down on Greg’s cock, Greg’s hand curling around the back of his neck immediately as he goes, practically on instinct. God, he wants to do this every day, he _should_ do this every day — Greg makes a choked noise as his head hits the back of Tom’s throat, and Tom gags for a moment but doesn’t stop, can’t stop, wouldn’t in a million fucking lifetimes. It’s messy, and the slick noises escaping from his mouth make Tom feel shameful and raw and desperate to get it deeper. He wants Greg to fuck his mouth, wants to choke on it; he moans around Greg’s length and bobs up and down, faster, hotter, wetter. Reckless.  
  
Greg taps his head, the universal blowjob road sign for _bridge out ahead_ , but Tom doesn’t pull off, just moans again and dives back down, and then Greg comes down his throat with a choked noise and falls back, motionless, against the door.  
  
Tom slumps against the floor between Greg’s long legs. He’s still hard as a brick and fully clothed. He feels like he's had the wind knocked out of him.  
  
“Fuck you,” he says when he catches his breath. “You don’t get to be — you’re not the one who should be embarrassed, you fuck.”  
  
Greg rakes a hand through Tom’s hair, getting a grip at the roots and pulling so hard he gasps. Greg drags his head back, forcing his gaze upward, and Tom licks his lips, meeting his eyes unflinchingly. Greg stares at him, dark and unknowable, and every inch of Tom’s skin is screaming for more when Greg says, “Crawl.”  
  
It’s heady, it’s _awful_ , he can’t say no, not when he's like this. This is what Greg does to him, makes him feel like a wild animal. He drops his hands to the ground, avoiding Greg’s pointed, hard stare in the direction of his bedroom, and he crawls.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Tom doesn’t hurry to get dressed after he comes. He can hear Greg in the bathroom, washing his hands like Lady Macbeth scrubbing in for open-heart surgery, but he doesn't move; he stays sprawled on the bed, motionless, eyes on the blinkering Jersey skyline visible across the Hudson through the bedroom windows.  
  
When Greg comes back in, he looks startled, maybe, that Tom is still here. But he doesn’t say anything, just paces to the dresser, putting on boxers with an agitated energy that makes Tom feel for the first time like he did the wrong thing.  
  
“I have an early meeting,” Greg says abruptly. "So you can't stay.”  
  
“Didn’t plan to,” says Tom. “I think we should talk.”  
  
“There’s nothing to talk about.”  
  
“I disagree.” He finally sits up, groaning with the effort and wincing again when he feels his knees pop. “There’s a big fucking elephant in the room here, okay, and I don’t plan on just ignoring it while it shits all over the fucking carpet and tears up the place."  
  
“What are you even—”  
  
“I don’t think we should do anything,” Tom explodes. “I thought about it and I just — don’t. We did something stupid, we both know that, but rushing to erase it might just call _more_ attention to it, and I don’t want to make an even bigger mistake. Okay? We’ve both been very fucking careful, and anything could happen, and I just.” He licks his lips, catches his breath. “Don't grab the wheel and crash the car. We'll be careful. We won't do anything. Just... wait."  
  
Greg stares. “I don’t even know what to say to that."  
  
“Don’t say anything.” Tom busies himself getting dressed; he can feel Greg’s eyes on him while he searches the floor for his socks. Finally, he toes back into his loafers and rises to his full height, imperious despite everything that just happened, everything between them, just — everything.  
  
“Fine,” Greg says. “Just between us, then. Because that worked so well the last time.”  
  
“It actually did,” Tom spits, “until you tried to blackmail me.”  
  
Greg holds up his hands and slumps, exhausted and defeated. “Just between us.”  
  
It is what it is, Tom thinks. He takes the elevator downstairs. He catches a cab. It is what it is.


End file.
